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Cacti and Faith

This next Lenten poem is written in a kind of freestyle verse. It's always intriguing to me that when you run words and sentences together in certain rhythms they create certain emotions. I was thinking about faith while writing this poem - how absolutely long it takes for any sort of progress to be made on the human heart. Whether the desired end result is healing, contentment, restoration, or holiness, it all takes so so long before you can see fruit, blossoms of springtime growing boldly out of finally fertile soil.


3.
(Faith)
Why can't my cactuses just bloom already instead of sitting there soaking up all the water I occasionally remember to give them with no semblance of using it for anything more than enriching their spines that get caught in my sweatshirt on moving day when, like prized possessions, they ride up front with me and fall from their forgotten place on the dash when Tom backs out the truck so that I grab at them through a camouflage of plastic wal-mart sacks, not remembering that spines are meant to lodge - the point gets them inside skin and then branches out like an anchor clawing into sand. 

So there is a spine in my hand, not a flower.
It will be a while before my body pushes it back up, slowly slowly toward the surface.



(photograph by Dallas Lam)

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